We’re sleepwalking into a mass extinction

Isabella Dibbini

Mr. Ippolito

AP Bio

March 25, 2018

“'We're Sleepwalking into a Mass Extinction' Say Scientists.” ScienceDaily, ScienceDaily, 21 Mar. 2018, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180321121558.htm.

The article “We’re sleepwalking into a mass extinction,” from the online source Science Daily, talks about diverse aquatic communities, and how they could be the most vulnerable to extinction. Researches from various well known Universities in the United Kingdom have published a study in Communication Biology, where they examined the patterns of diversity change across the evolutionary tree of the caridean shrimps. These crustaceans are a crucial component of the marine food chain, but also make up an vital important contribution to the fisheries worldwide. This allowed scientists to explore where rates of diversification sped up and slowed down over the past 200 million years. Their data showed that shrimp have independently transitioned from marine to freshwater habitats repeated, creating more diversity. A professor of Evolutionary Paleobiology at the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath, Matthew Wills said “We are sleepwalking into a mass extinction of magnitude unparalleled since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.” He continues to talk about how diversity takes millions of years to evolve, but it can also be damaged in an instant. Wills believes that we are losing diversity that has never been documented, and that is is absolutely necessary to understand the mechanisms that drive evolution into new species.

Although this investigation was conducted on animals, it does have a crucial effect on our society today. The research they are doing is important for predicting the effects of ongoing, human-made environmental change. Dr Katie Davis, the lead author of the paper, supported this fact when she stated “... the responses of groups in the geological past can predict their likely responses in the future.” She continued to state “We hope our work will help us to learn lessons from the last 200 million of years -- a different scale to that of most ecological studies.”

Throughout this article, the author makes statements and supports them with concrete evidence. In addition, the structure of this article is well planned out. The author begins by introducing his main argument and then goes into depth about the studies conducted by researchers from the University of York, the University of Bath and Oxford University. While this article was well written, there are a few things that the author could have done to make their story more compelling. One suggestion that can be made to improve this article would be to incorporate additional plans on how scientists would further this study. Overall, this article was interesting and very well written.